Smart Contract Patents

It’s about that time again to check in and see how many patent filings mention smart contracts. The first time I wrote about this was in June ’16 here, and then again in March of this year here. Smart contracts are very much a part of the current zeitgeist (sidebar, if you ever want to feel like an idiot read Hegel), and all the rage in the B2B world.

The first time this search was run there were seven hits. The second time the search was run there were fifty-six hits. This time? One hundred and thirty six filings mention smart contracts. This is less than seven months since I last ran the search when the number was fifty-six. Of those filings, eight are issued patents and 128 are published patent applications.

The first chart below shows the growth in filings by publication year. The second chart below shows the number of filings by the year they were filed.

Each year there are more and more patent filings that we know about that are related to smart contracts. What the second chart shows us is the growth in the number of filings. Those numbers are not final, as there are undoubtedly still more filings that are not yet public. Based on the trend shown by these numbers its not unrealistic to assume that twice as many patent applications have been filed in 2017 that mention smart contracts than were filed in 2016. That would be around 150 patent applications filed in 2017 making use of smart contracts.

More broadly speaking, the growth in the number of filings that mention smart contracts is in line with what we would expect from the maturing blockchain industry. I wrote about this emerging blockchain patent landscapein March of this year. Companies, large and small, are moving to protect their innovation in this space. Bigger numbers are on the horizon.